 Thank you so much for coming today. The title of my talk is misdirection thoughts on the future of programmable money is just the Generic title I give for every talk I give and then I change it just before I get up on stage because this is all improv folks I'm going to be talking about Universal basic finance. That's the topic of my talk today Where at the moment at a crossroads where we're having a great debate About the future of cryptocurrency about the future of finance and a lot of people are expressing some very strong opinions Myself included the backdrop to all of this is All of the people who aren't in this room who will never be in a room like this in In 2013 I visited for the first time the beautiful country of Argentina and I did a talk in Buenos Aires and It completely changed the direction and trajectory of my involvement in Bitcoin and open blockchains For the first time I didn't need to explain why Why Bitcoin why open blockchains? Why freedom of finance? Everybody there was interested in one and only one question. How? How do I do it right now? Because the why is obvious It's obvious to people from Argentina Someone came to me at the conference and said you've inspired me today. I was terrified to come to this conference I was afraid of what might happen if our government changes again My grandparents were kidnapped By the previous regime. We didn't see them for months. We thought they'd thrown them out of an airplane I Think about that for a second We talk about financial inclusion. We talk about the banked and the unbanked and we have no clue In our position of privilege what this means It shook me to the core and I've had conversations like that every year since I've started working in this space People who come to me and say I hear you Because that's my story too What does it mean to be unbanked? The World Bank defines unbanked as the two and a half billion people Who have absolutely no access to financial services and live in cash-based societies? Conveniently they only count heads of household Meaning the spouses and children are unimportant in this calculation Only the primary earners Matter and yet we know that in the vast majority of the world finances controlled by women They're not counted as the head of household To be unbanked is not to simply have only access to a cash-based society to be unbanked is to lack connectivity to the world it's to lack the ability to participate in Trade and commerce to be able to get a job that connects you with other people who want your services around the world To build a future for your children It is to be condemned to poverty and when we look at that. What do we think? They don't have money. That's why they're unbanked wrong Absolutely wrong They don't have access They don't have documentation They don't have the necessary literacy to fill in an application form and Sometimes they don't have the clothes or the shoes or the appearance To even be able to enter a bank without getting kicked out by the security guard That's what it means to be unbanked And what does that do it creates enormous poverty around the world just so we can persist in This petty bourgeois idea that as long as we have every participant in every transaction Prove their identity and we can track and control Every transaction through this totalitarian surveillance system. We will end crime and In order to believe in that false idea of safety through totalitarian control We condemn billions of people to poverty Billions of people not two and a half billion many many more We talk about Financial inclusion from the perspective of the rich and privileged world. We live in the the world. I live in as An American citizen. I have access not only to open a bank account But also to trade in multiple currencies without restrictions Access to unlimited investment opportunities all around the world access to capital liquidity and credit The stability of a currency that doesn't destroy itself overnight taking my entire savings with it and Hopefully most of the time access to institutions that are not actively stealing my money Or Governments that are not actively destroying the currency in order to pay off their debt through shadow inflation hyperinflation and then finally financial collapse How many people have that Everyone in this room probably But if you count all of the people around the world who have access to that kind of financial service It's maybe a billion and a half And that's why after 2013 I started saying strongly and Loudly This is about the other six billion That's what financial inclusion means Our regulatory system is actively excluding people from access to finance We have finally reached a point Where access to the most basic financial services has become a privilege a Privilege that the average person has to exercise this dance of Proving themselves worthy in front of a banker a Filling in reams of paperwork and application forms in order to be granted the privilege of financial services and We even turn around and condemn cash the ultimate peer-to-peer Anonymous fungible mechanism that for millennia has provided financial services to everyone basic financial services and Cash has one fate of law and it's not that it's anonymous that it's the greatest feature and it's not that it's used by Criminals criminals get a banking license and defraud people by the millions its greatest feature is That it is available to everyone without vetting its greatest feature is that it is an open transparent neutral verifiable peer-to-peer transactional system and It's greatest weakness is that it is constrained by geography and locality. It doesn't have range and scale and Now we have a new form of digital cash Which is also open and it's also neutral and verifiable Unforgible transportable but this one is borderless It's censorship resistant It can be used even when your government doesn't want you to use it It can be used without privilege without identity and It can be used everywhere in the world by whoever wants to use it by simply downloading the software and Running it on whatever computing device they can afford That is the real revolution here and while we're having a little Privilege discussions about should we regulate crypto? How much should we regulate crypto? Who should regulate crypto? Fuck that crypto is About providing Universal basic finance to whoever needs it everywhere in the world whether we like it or not And what will people do with universal basic finance what they've done for millennia with access to cash? They will build a future for their children We are paralyzed by the fear of a few bad actors Blinded by the fact that the worst actors are the ones who act with state privilege and endorsements With the intelligence agencies hand-in-hand Inside the surveillance capitalism mechanism to fund dictators and drug lords all around the world With our tax money to the tune of trillions The real terrorism the real drug financing doesn't happen in cash it happens in millions of barrels of oil and billions of pallets of dollars Transmitted through wire transfers by the banks who get called again and again and again and again and they pay a fine That is a fraction Not only of the criminal behavior that they profited from But of the tens of thousands of deaths they've directly contributed to and not a single person goes to jail and at the same time Some people have the audacity to say that we need to end cash in order to stop crime hum Magnificently self-righteous in the United States 18% of the population does not have access to banking services. That's 60 million people. I recited this fact at a banking conference and one lady in the back raised her hand and said Why should we give? Illegals bank accounts That's a chilling statement to make let me translate it to you in words that will make more of an impact those people Don't deserve the privilege of financial inclusion those people When your neighbor says those people don't belong in our neighborhood It freaks you out because you suddenly realize you're living next to a bigot But when a banking regulator says why should we give? Illegals a bank account. I calmly responded You shouldn't We will at the last conference. I attended After I gave a speech to crying the lack of security and financial inclusion a young man came to me and said This really spoke to my personal story Young man in his 20s has been living in Western and developed countries for the past 15 years Has not been able to open a bank account in 15 years Every time I write my name and place of birth in the application. The process has already ended. I Was born in Iran. I didn't choose that. I didn't do anything. I Pay my taxes I have a job. All I want is to deposit my paycheck In a bank account so I can buy groceries For 15 years. I've been unable to do that That is the face of the unbanked There are people walking the streets around you in this city of privilege in the independent district of the city of London bought and paid for by banking corporations in this little enclave That is the Vatican of capitalism a city within a city People walking around you invisible people your janitors your service professionals the people making you a sandwich who don't have a bank account who take their paycheck in cash and they go to Various places in order to ask for payday loans Maybe they take a check or all the form of payment they can deposit and they get charged 10 or 15 percent Or 30 percent to send money home to their loved ones so they can support a basic life of subsistence That's the unbanked they're right here in this city. Don't imagine the great masses of Africa, of course, they're unbanked or Southeast Asia or South America right here your neighbors and They have been made to live in that position Just so we can continue this illusion that safety comes from totalitarian surveillance This very conference is being sponsored by a company that is spreading around millions of dollars in marketing That does surveillance that is actually promoting and advancing the state of the art You all have their name on your badge look down and check it out a Company that builds state-of-the-art surveillance and then shares and sells that data to companies That further progress that data to intelligence agencies and this lovely form of trickle-down surveillance eventually reaches some regime That likes to cut up journalists with hacksaws Don't fool yourself There is no ability to separate your position within a company like that from the moral implications of your actions and I say to you if you're hiring people and you see names like that on the resume Just like if I was hiring people and I saw journal dynamics Ray Theon Lockheed Martin Or any of the companies in our space that are promoting and actively pursuing surveillance technology to sell it to the highest bidder They have declared moral bankruptcy If you declare moral bankruptcy you should have seven years of Trying to find a job and being interrogated about your ethics Just like one of the poor people whose life has been stuck in a box of poverty We'll have to spend seven years trying to prove to a banker that they have the level of privilege to get banking We have to make some deep moral choices at the moment We stand at a crossroads because right now the world governments are trying to abolish cash They're trying to abolish the very last lifeline that remains for the billions of people who have a life of poverty Not because they don't work. They work harder than all of us not because they don't deserve But simply because of where they were born or what documentation they have or what level of literacy They have or even how they look In Saudi Arabia women are not allowed to own property and bank accounts And this is the case in half a dozen countries around the world and we look at that and say Shame on them. That's immoral. That's disgusting And then we turn around and we do the same thing to immigrants in this country and my country I'm half British half American. I have to apologize to a hundred and ninety four countries around the world the moment I arrive and I know In my heart that every time I pay taxes. I'm killing thousands of people by proxy. I still pay Because I'm also helping people who are in welfare People who need help most importantly when we make these moral choices. We have to understand Surveillance never stopped crime Surveillance is the license given To the people who are on the top of that To control our lives They will commit crimes. They will commit the worst of crimes What I call mega crimes and I know Britain doesn't use the metric system So mega is the prefix we use for millions a mega crime is one where for example You foreclose on a million homeowners and don't go to jail. That's a mega crime We're doing surveillance and analytics To catch a petty drug dealer who's selling pot for Bitcoin Who's doing surveillance and analytics on Lockheed Martin? Who's doing surveillance and analytics on the money laundering banks? Nobody. Do you know why? None of them ever go to jail. The regulators are completely captured and the very system of controlling finance from above By having levers of power over the lives of millions of people billions of people of having the audacity to cut off entire Countries and say well, they're under sanctions They're not privileged enough. They're not people enough to gain financial services Guess who that attracts if you build levers of power like that The very worst sociopaths in our society are Tracted like flies to shit To grab hold of those levers of power and destroy all of your freedoms as quickly as they can We are building societies in which one bad election is The last election and if you don't believe me look at what's happened in Turkey. What's happened in Russia? What's happened in Venezuela? What happens every day to billions of people around the world? Let me end on a positive note because you're probably a bit freaked out by all of this You should be this is serious stuff Open borderless public transparent neutral censorship resistant Strictly private Cryptocurrencies exist They will not be regulated They cannot be regulated Not by committees because they're regulated by mathematics. They're regulated by algorithms They provide certainty of transaction. They provide programmable customer protection. They provide reputation management They provide access without identity They give billions of people eventually not just a bank Account in their pocket, but a bank in their pocket They democratize the function of banking and turn it into an app that everyone can access without vetting Because they've already Prevetted They have agreed to download the software that follows the rules of consensus and that is the only vetting required in these systems but we shouldn't Allow that We did But we can't have people make anonymous transactions They will But we must Regulate this you can't and you won't Because six billion people need this and you have neither the moral authority Nor more importantly the practical capability to stand in their way or Even to stand in the way of what is going to be the greatest revolution in financial services in three centuries Universal access to basic finance. Thank you Thank you